Evil

“The almost 3,000 deaths in the Sept. 11 attacks were answered by an estimated 460,000 deaths in Iraq alone, including more American combatant deaths than civilians who died in the World Trade Center.”

“Perhaps because of its hybrid religious and secular credentials, our concept of evil exerts an almost mystical power over society’s impulse to make order out of chaos and despair. As Susan Neiman writes in her landmark study, “Evil in Modern Thought,” “The problem of evil can be expressed in theological or secular terms, but it is fundamentally a problem about the intelligibility of the world as a whole.”